Dissecting Video Games, Books, Movies & More!

Monthly Archives: March 2014

Quick post to keep this blog active while I slowly work my way through Mass Effect.All my fellow video game music enthusiasts must subscribe to the following Youtube channel if you haven’t already… Smooth McGroove!:

That is his latest video. He usually posts new songs every Monday. Typically, he does acapella rearrangements of old retro favorites, but once in a great while he does covers from the PS2-era. Nintendo games seem to be favorites of his. Smooth is open to doing suggestions and such, but it is no secret he goes for whatever pulls at our nostalgic heart strings. It always wins me over.

I still have a few games and songs I’m begging him to do every week, namely Dr. Mario and any Megaman VI songs. Speaking of Megaman, his Megaman X songs (He’s done 3 so far) are amazing, and his cover of Megaman 2’s Dr. Wily stage song is totally addictive and pays great homage to that 8-bit classic.

Honestly, Smooth McGroove’s weekly video game acapella cover is the only thing I look forward to on Mondays!

I love JRPGs. Playing Final Fantasy VIII opened a new world to gaming that was previously restricted to platformers and puzzle games. But as I get older and more jaded, I can’t help but notice that the more things change, the more things stay the same. I’m impressed by the snazzy new battle system, but all the JRPG tropes plaguing this genre which is dying with Western audiences are present and accounted for.

One of the main selling points for Final Fantasy veterans like myself are the big names slapped on the front of the package. Hironobu Sakaguchi, old Final Fantasy executive producer, and renowned composer Nobuo Uematsu, reunited for this project. As usual, Nobuo does not disappoint. I’m planning on downloading this soundtrack sometime soon. There are a handful of memorable tracks I’d love to have on my iPod.

The main positive of The Last Story is the fresh, engaging battle system… for the first half of the game or so. I’ll do my best to explain the highlights. It’s one of those games that feels fun and quick to pick up at first, but five hours into the game when you’re still getting battle tutorials it’s like, “Oh, wow, there’s a lot more to this than I thought.” Which is okay, but then it turns into annoying, gimmicky fights later on that get old when you have limited control of your ally AI actions.

In The Last Story, you’ll be playing as a ragtag band of mercenaries, joined by a magic-centric noblewoman. The main character is Zael, a swordsman with a crossbow, who you’ll take control of most of the game. There are small missions when he isn’t present and someone else will head the party. Otherwise, you’re stuck with Zael because he’s the main character, and therefore granted special powers and issues the commands even though he isn’t the merc’s leader. The Last Story is an action-RPG. Player characters and enemies are free to wander the battle area as they see fit. Controlling Zael’s basic physical attacks is as simple as approaching an enemy. There are weird stealth elements weaved into the battle system. Zael can hide behind pillars and around corners to slash at enemies for extra damage, or shoot an arrow to draw their attention. There’s also an ability called Vertical Slash. I hated using it because it requires running against a wall for about five seconds before he decides to run up and perform the move. And that’s IF you’re actually running against a wall and not some other flat vertical surface like a pillar. Those are no nos, silly me.

Zael doesn’t have any magic spells, per se, but he has special abilities to add some flavor. He obtains the Gathering ability early on. This performs a few necessary functions in battle. The most noteworthy of them is the ability to revive fallen party members. Here’s where the battles play a bit differently from most other games I’ve played. There are no usable battle items. None. So, there’s no worrying about consumable pools of magic or anything like that. How does one revive fallen party members, you ask? For each fight, all the characters have 5 expendable lives each. When they go down, they’ll automatically revive after a set amount of time. It feels like forever, but I’m sure it’s more like 10-15 seconds. If you’re in a hurry for your healer or DPSer to wake up, Zael can revive them with a touch if Gathering is active. Pretty handy. If the main character loses all 5 lives, it is a Game Over. If you happen to get a Game Over, do not fret. Manual saves and checkpoint saves are abundant so you won’t lose much progress.

Another unique ability is the “Gale” skill. This creates a fascinating element to battles I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. The party mages only have two spells a piece. Doesn’t sound like a lot, I know, but check this out: Every spell is cast as a circle on the floor, so it has an area of effect. Heal circles are a white circle on the ground that the characters must stand in to heal, for example. BUT every spell also has a secondary effect that triggers when Zael uses the Gale ability inside of it. When the Recover spell gets dissolved, it heals and removes negative status effects for all characters. When Yurick’s Fire circle is active, that element is added to any of your physical attackers standing inside of it. When dissolved, it lowers enemy defense. I found this unique twists to typical action-RPGs an awesome breath of fresh air.

Until the boss fights roll around. Then the lack of control over the AI characters gets frustrating. The only time Zael can issue commands to party members is when a certain segmented bar is full. Not a big deal when leveling or fighting trash. Boss fights are an entirely different story. There always seems to be one specific spell or ability that has to be performed in order to do any damage to the boss. Calista will be all, “Zael, use my barrier!” without bothering to cast the damn spell herself. You’d think that between only having TWO spells to cast the AI could be bothered to use the right one on it’s own. But it refuses, so you have to go through the command option whenever the bar is full to tell them to do it, only to turn around and use Gale to trigger the madatory diffusion effect. By the way, Gale uses one segment of the SAME bar that must be filled to issue a command.

See where I’m going with this?

This process made tricky and end game bosses really annoying. If only there were a way to preset the AI. I would’ve been happy with just being able to tell the mages to favor offensive or defensive. Guess the developers couldn’t have been bothered with that. All but one of the characters favor either magic or physical. But Lowell, the only party member who isn’t particularly better at either, has one magic command and one physical command. What the AI had Lowell doing at any given point is anyone’s guess. I just gave him the best sword available after equipping my physical attackers and hoped for the best.

One of my RPG pet peeves is what I like to call “party raping.” Being party raped means the game is constantly throwing certain party members in and out of the party, leading to frustration when I get to like certain characters but don’t determine when I actually get to use them. The Last Story constantly does this. In fact, it never doesn’t do it. Unless you’re fighting in the optional Arena, you will never choose who participates in the active fights. This didn’t annoy me as much as I thought it would for two reasons:

1.) You’re always given access to non-active character’s equipment screens, so you can take back that awesome sword that isn’t being used whenever you want. Even during battle.

2.) Character customization in this game is so shallow that there isn’t much to miss out on. The game will hook you up with whatever mage (AKA- spell du jour) that you need for the gimmicky boss fight. I learned to be happy with that.

The equipment menu is not very involved either. Each character can wear one chest piece and one leg piece. Armor and greaves. Keeping it simple. All armor can be dyed when you collect the proper mats, in case you’re getting bored with the default templates. There’s even a couple side quests that will give you invisible dye upon completion. That’s right. Invisible dye. Nothing like shamelessly exploiting pixels to satisfy those rogue “I wonder what Syrenne’s bra looks like” thoughts.

Throughout the game you’ll pick up items which can be used to level equipment up to +9, depending. First you’ll only need moola, then gnome copper, then gnome silver, then gnome gold, for example. As you progress, the necessary items for upgrading become more and more rare. I only had maxed armor for Zael by the end. I had better luck with the weapons, but they capped at +5. As weapons and armor level, they gain extra perks which is nice. I had Zael equipped with weapons that had a Death on hit percent chance, and it procced a lot! No complaints there.

Acquiring mats for upgrading and such is typical RPG fare. Treasure chests and enemy drops. The trick in Last Story is that every drop is random. I’m not entirely sure how it works, but when a chest is opened or an enemy drops something, a reel quickly cycles through a list that looks something like random piece of armor, or random arrow type, or random weapon. I felt like I got quite a bit of rares out of this. Oh, and enemies also drop permanent stat boosts! While traveling dungeons, sewers and whatnot, Zael and his companions stumble upon summoning circles. Triggering the Gathering ability on these summon circles makes enemies pop. I loved this method of grinding for a game with no random encounters. I spent a good half hour or so at each summoning circle, leveling and picking up stat boosts at the same time!

I used to play JRPGs for the story. Not anymore. The Last Story really solidified that for me. It’s really a conglomeration of predictable and recycled plot points with medieval fantasy elements thrown in. For example: The very first time Zael meets the game’s love interest, I was having childhood flashbacks from watching Disney’s Aladdin. Remember when Aladdin meets Jasmine in the market place and she’s all, “What? I have to pay for this apple?” …Yeah. The same exact thing happens in this game. I was in shock. Then they run away from the guards together? A huh. I’d eat my own shoe if the writers of this game were hooked to a polygraph and said they’d never seen Disney’s classic Aladdin movie. Then there’s the typical cheesiness of characters apparently being on the brink of death so they can spout some heart-wrenching sentiments, yet five minutes later they’re remarkably better and fighting alongside you in battle. Stuff like this just makes me roll my eyes.

The characters are mostly cookie cutter stereotypes, if you can fathom that. I couldn’t help but like Syrenne, the rough-around-the-edges lush with a hot accent. As it turns out, she and Lowell (the playboy) have some kind of history together, but you’ll never know what it is unless you do the easy-to-miss side quest. I missed it, naturally, so I really know nothing about either of them from before the game began. The rest of the playable characters do get fleshed out histories, which I appreciate.

While I’m talking about the way the story is written, I have another retrospective thought to throw out there. Not only are side quests easy to miss, but so are complete chapters! Imagine, complete chapters can just be ignored. Can you imagine reading a book and having multiple chapters with content not required in order to get the complete story? What would we consider those in a video game? Oh I know… side quests! I’m not entirely sure how they figured what was considered a “Chapter” compared to a “Side Quest” but it’s got me scratching my head. Pretty sure if I handed in a manuscript and there were entire chapters that weren’t necessary the editor would shred and burn them.

The actual side quests are very easy to miss. Somewhere along the line I was under the impression it was getting to be normal and expected for NPCs with available quests to have some sort of indicator above their heads. But after playing this game and Lightning Returns, I’m coming to the realization that this is not the case. I’m good at speaking with NPCs my first go ’round of a city, but I can never remember where they are when it comes time to turn the quests in. Plus there’s no quest log in the main menu to remind me of the quests. Not good for someone like me who sometimes only gets to play on the weekends. And my memory is crap. All in all, I didn’t get many side quests done. I did season 1 of the arena multiple times. I repeated the fights in season 2 a couple of times, but when the gamblers outside offered me the same lowly rewards they did for the easier fights, I stopped bothering.

I also found about 90% of the scenery to be bland and boring. Kind of depressing, considering how short the game is for a JRPG. There is only one main city, a castle, and a handful of other areas to explore throughout the game. I appreciate games not padding hours just because. That actually drives me nuts. But with such a limited scope, I can’t believe they had the nerve to bring me back to the starting dungeon near the end of the game. I really didn’t need to see that boring Reptid cave again, thanks. I’ll take that pitch black room before the final boss fight as their pivotal moment of creativity.

Oh, the final boss fight. The plot is so predictable, if you didn’t see this one coming then I’m going to assume you skipped over the cutscenes. Actually, you don’t skip cutscenes, you fast-forward through them which is funny because letting the button go prematurely makes the cutscene play out with no audio. But the character’s justification for everything is just plain stupid. Like most of the story. I hate this boss fight because I died about three times. Every death was at the final form. For a game so generous with checkpoints, I find it weird there weren’t any between the boss forms. Don’t bother trying to kill the final boss if your levels aren’t in the mid-60’s. I was level 62, died three times, reloaded my last save (because you’re blocked off from just turning around into the next room where the summon circle is) and grinded until 66. Then I killed the boss with relative ease.

Was I rewarded with a happy ending and credits? Not right away. For some reason there are FOUR epilogue chapters to complete after the final boss fight to actually see the ending. Completely unnecessary and anti-climatic. I killed the final boss, okay? Give me my happy ending, staff roll, and ask me if I want to save my file for a New Game+. Why on earth should I have to do another boring dungeon with a spider boss fight to see something that could just happen after the narrator does the whole, “Here’s everyone rebuilding Lazulis castle for the THIRD time. But hey, Zael and his friends are legends and stuff.” The end. That might’ve been this game’s one go at padding gameplay hours. My only guess is that they were like, “Oh no, gamers can beat this RPG in only 20-something hours… we better add some crap!”

There is also online multiplayer, but with Nintendo turning off online support for Wii and DS, I suppose I won’t ever get around to checking it out.

I know this post comes off as a rant, but I did like this game and can picture myself playing it again down the road. Like Xenoblade Chronicles (which is definitely a superior game), it is a breath of fresh air from the rest of the wii offerings. If you want to give this game a shot, I only advise you disregard the title and don’t think about the story very much. I think the few paragraphs I wrote about The Last Story in this blog was more effort than the writers put into writing this “story” themselves.

Remember that post I wrote a month or so ago about my frustrating forgetting to save “oops moment?” Well, it was in regards to this game, and I finally went back to it after reading a novel in the interim. I faced my stupid mistake, sucked up my pride, and re-did the dungeon/dungeon and a half that I evidently forgot to save after. I was mostly annoyed with myself for not only forgetting to save, but also for forgetting to abuse the awesome virtual console features on the 3DS. The 3DS has the ability to create a save state on the retro game you’re currently playing, which totally reminds me of playing NES and SNES games on a computer emulator. Nostalgia feels.

This whole game was one big nostalgia feels session for me. My favorite GameBoy game ever is Link’s Awakening. And Oracle of Seasons is stupidly reminiscent of it. I haven’t played its partner game, Oracle of Ages yet, but I suspect its quite similar. The map, menus, and music are all too familiar. Especially the recycled music. Normally I’d complain about recycled music, but I like it so much I don’t even care. Nostalgia is a powerful thing, I tell you.

Oracle of Seasons is named thus because, well, the oracle of seasons has been kidnapped and needs to be rescued. Din the oracle is the damsel of distress du jour that Link has the pleasure of rescuing from Dark Lord Onox. Why? Well, because.

Anyone who has played a LoZ game knows primarily what to expect; 8 dungeons, a world map that is a PITA to explore, and pointless nods to Hyrule and Princess Zelda. Yes, there is a super-hot princess in a faraway kingdom. I get it. But that’s neither here nor there. How about the NPCs spend their one to two lines of dialogue telling me how to get to the next dungeon instead?

Oracle of Seasons is puzzle-heavy, making exploring the world map more of a chore than it really needs to be. On top of using power bracelets, Roc feather and cape, and a metallic glove (basically this game’s Hookshot replacement) to traverse obstacles, Link also acquires a “Rod of Seasons.” This special rod can change the season which alters how Link can interact with the landscape. The Rod of Seasons only works when Link is standing on a special stump. I still can’t wrap my head around why that is, but whatever. So you’ll wander around the map, looking for a stump to change the season to whichever new one you unlocked, without really knowing what you’re looking for. It’s kind of hard to know where the ice will appear or where the snowbanks Link can walk across will show up until after you change the season. Expect to do a lot of semi-pointless wandering around unless you don’t have time for that crap like me and use a FAQ.

A big tree that can’t see to stay awake is always asking Link to save the Essences of Nature between yawns. There are 8 of them (imagine that) and collecting all of them unlocks the final dungeon. As you can probably tell, I’m not too enthused about the “story” (This is Legend of Zelda, after all) nor do I remember much of it after only beating the game last week. Basically after defeating the Dark Lord there is a teaser to the companion game, Oracle of Ages. Then there’s a special code to input when you load up the new game. And vice versa if you start with Oracle of Ages then play Seasons second.

Retro Gameboy games only hold up against the test of time so well. The 3DS save state feature (that I am an idiot and kept forgetting to use) helps immensely. However, aside from adding more buttons to map items to, nothing can be done about the annoying amount of times I had to go into my sub menu to change my equipment. During more than one boss fight I found myself relying on 3 different weapons and tools which required so-many-pauses. THEN, on top of that, if you’re using a slingshot or a seed from the satchel, you then have to select which of the four options you want. And this will happen for more than one boss fight. It’s like, “So… wait… I need to use my sword, and my fire seeds, and my Roc cape, and Pegasus seeds? HOW?!” You get the idea. Not being new to old Zelda games, I expected it, and I’m sure you will too, but it doesn’t make it any less annoying.

Another feature different from Link’s Awakening is the incorporation of pretty jewelry for Link to wear. Just rings, unfortunately. Every ring Link finds has to be taken back to Vasu the jeweler to be appraised. Only then can you find out what useful or useless feature it has. Thank the gaming gods Gale Seeds allow for fast travel in this game or I probably would’ve been walking around with a couple dozen unappraised rings for half the game. Once Vasu tells you what the ring does, you pick from your ring inventory which ones you want to carry around (up to three) and even then you can only equip one at a time. There’s a ring that grants times two sword damage with no repercussions, which makes it hard to care what the other rings do. But a certain ring that takes care of electric damage proves useful during the final encounter.

Not only is there the main world map that’s a bitch, er, puzzle, to explore, this game also has an underworld called Subrosia. I liked this area. It was full of cute, charming creatures who either helped Link along his quest or created mischief. This underworld correlates well to the corresponding map above ground. Navigating in Subrosia was relaxing because there wasn’t really any season crap to worry about. Subrosia mostly has mini games and cutesy chase sequences that are a fun break.

Pretty much everything else is what you’d come to expect from an old Zelda game, recycled music and enemies included! The usual frustrations aside, I couldn’t help but enjoy my time with this brainteaser action-adventure game. If this happens to be a Gameboy Legend of Zelda title you haven’t played, download it for cheap and do it! Me? I can’t decide if I want to download Oracle of Ages or play Link Between Worlds.